page_title: Jefferson–Hemings controversy
section_title: Early claims
hierarchical_section_title: Jefferson–Hemings controversy / Controversy / Early claims
caption_attribution_description: Engraving: "'A philosophic cock' attributed to James Akin, Newburyport, Massachusetts, ca.1804." Depicts a caricature of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
context_page_description: The Jefferson–Hemings controversy is a historical debate over whether there was a sexual relationship between U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, and whether he fathered some or all of her six recorded children. For more than 150 years, most historians denied rumors from Jefferson's presidency that he had a slave concubine. Based on his grandson's report, they said that one of his nephews had been the father of Hemings' children. Before changing his mind following the results of DNA analysis in 1998, Jefferson biographer Joseph J. Ellis had said, "The alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history." In the 21st century, most historians agree that Jefferson is the father of one or more of Sally's children.
  Beginning in 1953, new documentation related to this issue was published and studied by historians. In a 1972 article in American Heritage and later in her bestselling 1974 biography of Jefferson, Fawn M. Brodie suggested Jefferson had been the father of Hemings' children.
context_section_description: In 1802 the journalist James T. Callender, after being refused an appointment to a Postmaster position by Jefferson and issuing veiled threats of "consequences," reported that Jefferson had fathered several children with a slave concubine named Sally. His family denied the allegation. Others privately or publicly made the claim.  Elijah Fletcher, the headmaster of the New Glasgow Academy (Amherst County, Virginia) visited Jefferson in 1811 and wrote in his diary:
  The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts.
  Jefferson made no public comment on the matter, although most historians interpret his cover letter from 1805 to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith as a denial alluding to a fuller reply, which has been lost.
  The Jefferson-Wayles descendants and most historians denied for nearly 200 years that he was the father of Hemings' children. Since the mid-20th century, there have been challenges to that denial, as historians have re-examined some of the evidence and thought to interpret it differently. Disagreements have arisen since the late 20th century over how to interpret historical evidence related to the issue. According to an 1868 letter by Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall to the historian James Parton, Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said that Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha stated on her deathbed that Jefferson had been away from Monticello for 15 months before one of Hemings' children was born, so could not be the father. But historian Dumas Malone later documented that Jefferson had been at Monticello nine months before the birth of each of Hemings' children.
  Randolph also said: 
  [S]he [Hemings] had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins ... He [Randolph] said in one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.
  Randolph told Randall that the late Peter Carr, Jefferson's nephew by his sister and a married man at the time, had fathered Hemings' children, as an explanation for the "startling" close resemblance that every visitor to Monticello could see. According to legal professor Annette Gordon-Reed, by this act, he was violating a strong social taboo against naming a white man as the father of slave children, to explain the strong physical resemblance seen by visitors. She suggested he would only have done so for the more compelling reason of protecting his grandfather.
  Because of the social taboos about this topic, Randolph requested, and Randall agreed, to omit any mention of Hemings and her children in Randall's three-volume biography, Life of Thomas Jefferson (1858). But Randall passed on the Randolph oral history in a letter to the historian James Parton. He also suggested that he had personally seen records supporting it – but no such record has been found. Randall's 1868 letter relating Randolph's family account of the Peter Carr paternity was a "pillar" of later historians' assertions that Carr was the father of Hemings' children, and Jefferson was not.
caption: Caricature of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, ca.1804, attributed to James Akin (American Antiquarian Society)
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